


Five Times Mabel Introduced Someone To Her Invisible Brother

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Found Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 16:53:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5098166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And one time she didn't have to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Mabel Introduced Someone To Her Invisible Brother

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposting some old fic from the Transcendence AU blog on tumblr.

i.

“Haven’t seen your brother around much this week,” Lazy Susan said as she set a stack of pancakes down in front of Mabel. “The little men with the hats didn’t steal him, did they?”

“What? No, they tried to steal  _me_  and make  _me_  their queen, not Dipper.” Mabel brushed the question off with a laugh. “He’s right here!” She reached out and smacked her hand down on the table, although it looked oddly like her hand rebounded an inch or so above the table itself. “Hey! If you want pancakes, get your own, don’t try to steal mine!  _I_ can see you, you know.”

Susan carefully lifted up her drooping eyelid to peer at the empty seat beside Mabel, but no, there was nothing in the seat except a few ketchup stains that looked older than she was.

She shrugged. She’d seen a lot weirder things than an invisible child this week, and the shock was starting to wear off. “I’ll get you all another stack of pancakes,” she said, refilling Stan’s coffee mug with a wink. Sure, he hadn’t returned any of her three-hundred-and-some calls after their first date, but she was sure there’d been a sparkthere.

All she needed was a little perseverance.

 

ii.

Rosalie Honey looked out over the classroom, at the bright, smiling faces, and the sullen, glowering ones, and the laughing ones that didn’t seem to notice her at all, but then, that was to be expected on the first day of the seventh grade, wasn’t it? And after all, class hadn’t started yet, she could allow the youngsters a moment to chat amongst themselves, catch up after a long summer away from their little friends. She noted a few empty seats, mostly in the front row, although there was one empty desk towards the back of the room that, oddly, all the children in the neighbouring seats seemed to be leaning or turning away from, almost unconsciously. How strange. She’d have to talk to the principal about that if the phenomenon persisted in her other classes of the day, it might be something supernatural. Or perhaps just a job for the janitor.

The second hand ticked into place on the clock on the wall, a loud buzz echoing through the halls, and Rosalie got to her feet, clearing her throat for attention. When that didn’t work, she picked up the yardstick by the board and rapped it sharply on her desk. Thankfully, that got the attention of most of the children, though she still had to smile sweetly and directly at a couple of boys chatting in the back of the room. Those two looked like troublemakers, she’d have to keep an eye on them.

“Good morning, class, and welcome to the seventh grade!” Her cheery greeting was met with vacant stares and silence. Undaunted, Rosalie pressed on. “This will be a big year for all of you, and for me as well. This is my first year teaching at Piedmont Middle School, so I hope you’ll all help me fit right in!”

She noticed a few more grins amongst the children at that, not all of them entirely pleasant.

“Well. All right then.” Rosalie clapped her hands together. “Let’s see who’s here, shall we?”

Roll call went fairly smoothly, with a few children making silly noises rather than saying ‘Present’ or ‘Here’ and one of the boys from the back of the room insisting that his name was Tits Palmer (she’d put a stop to  _that_  quickly). And then she reached ‘Pines’.

Mabel nearly jumped out of her seat when her name was called, waving one arm weighted down with bangles in the air. “I am  _present!_  And so is Dipper.”

“It says here on the roll that your brother’s name is -”

“He prefers Dipper.”

Rosalie crossed her arms. “And he couldn’t tell me that himself?”

“Welllll…” Mabel glanced over at the only empty seat in the back of the room, the one beside her, the one that the other children all unconsciously leaned away from. “No, not really. He kinda hasn’t been able to talk to anybody but me since the big…you know, the incident. This summer. Also he’s kind of invisible to everybody but me. It’s a twin thing, probably. But he’s here!”

Rosalie’s heart went out instantly to this poor child. Lots of people had lost family members after the incident Mabel had mentioned, in the days and weeks that followed, as all kinds of things that should only exist in myth suddenly popped up. The poor girl obviously couldn’t handle the strain of losing her twin brother. Why had her parents allowed her to return to school in this state?

“Of course he is,” Rosalie said, in her sweetest, most soothing voice, and Mabel scowled, crossing her arms and slumping back in her seat.

“I’m telling the truth!”

“Of course you are,” Rosalie agreed, already planning when would be best to send Mabel for a talk with the school counselor.

 

iii.

“ _You’re_  the Mystery Twins?”

The huge, brilliant, braces-filled grin on the face of the rainbow-sweater-clad girl standing in the door that Evan had just opened didn’t so much as dim. “Yup! Here and equipped to help you with any supernatural problems you might be facing! When you’ve had a scare, the Mystery Twins are there!” She paused, and glanced over at a patch of thin air beside her. “What? I thought it was cute!”

“You’re a little younger than I expected,” Evan said. Okay, a lot younger. He was kind of expecting an adult, not a kid who barely looked – what, thirteen? Fourteen? She wasn’t much older than his little sister, that was for sure. “And I…only see one of you…?”

The girl flipped her long brown hair over her shoulder. “Yeah, that happens. I’m Mabel, and this is my brother Dipper!” She gestured with a theatrical flourish to the empty air beside her, and Evan managed not to roll his eyes only by thinking of how crushed his little sister would be if it were her standing on his front step.

“Look. Kid. It was nice of you to come all the way out here, but I think I’ll call a realsupernatural expert, okay?”

“Hey, we  _are_  real supernatural experts!” The girl – Mabel – pouted, and then turned to the patch of empty air, doing a creditable impression of listening to someone. “Oh, come on, why’re you being such a grumpy-grump-grump? He called us, of course he’s not going to -”

“Thanks again,” Evan said, as the girl started arguing with the patch of thin air beside her. He gently eased the door closed, and then, just for good measure, locked it and drew the deadbolt.

 

iv.

The girl (well, “girl”, she had to be at least sixteen, and if she was here at DemoCon, she was probably older) in the bright blue sweater with the picture of a polar bear in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses on the front had a name badge that read ‘Mizar the Cheerful’. She also had a killer smile and…were those licorice shoelaces she was wearing as hoop earrings?

“Hey,” Jeremy said, as she approached his table, scanning the prints he’d made up of various summoning circles with a thoughtful expression. “See anything you like?”

The girl looked at him, and then glanced over her right shoulder with an eyebrow raised in an expression halfway between confusion and disgust. “Not really,” she said bluntly, as she turned back to his prints.

Jeremy tried to brush off the sting to his pride. “Hey, sorry about that. It was a joke. Y’know? Funny?” When she didn’t laugh, he crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair. Yeesh. Tough crowd. “I just wanted to say hi, y’know, break the ice. You’ve gotta be new around here, I think I would’ve remembered seeing such a pretty face at DemoCon before. We’re kinda a niche interest group, y’know. Get the same faces coming back all the time. It can be hard to meet people.” He leaned forward, grinning up at her as she picked up a print of the circle for the Ineffable Blargathon. “Ooh, that guy’s a nasty one. Summon him without a handy volcano and a couple of virgins ready to throw into it and you’d better prepare to get your soul ripped out and chewed up. I’m Jeremy.”

The girl glanced over her shoulder again, almost like she was looking for someone, and then turned to him with a smile that looked a little less brilliant than it had when she’d first approached the table. “Mizar,” she said, gesturing to her nametag. She reached out, but didn’t take Jeremy’s offered hand, instead picking up another circle print from the table. “And this is my brother,” she said, with an offhand gesture to the patch of thin air beside her right shoulder.

“Who?” Jeremy asked, leaning in a little closer as she rummaged around in her pockets, trying to see which circle she’d decided she wanted.

The girl who called herself Mizar straightened up with a triumphant grin, pulling from her pocket not a wallet, like Jeremy had expected, but a pocketknife. Before he could stop her, she’d flipped it open and sliced a neat line down the pad of her left thumb, squeezing out a single bright bead of blood and smearing it over the printed circle she held in her hand.

Jeremy recognized it at the same time as she said, with a wicked grin, “Alcor.”

 

v.

Mabel Pines hadn’t shown up by quarter past seven, and Keo ( _Doctor_  Keo Torres,  _not_ Professor Keo Torres, she wasn’t tenure-track, although it was flattering to hear her students call her ‘Professor’) was starting to worry. The girl was bright, brilliant even, but she had a tendency to be…scattered, to have her attention on a million different things and to have difficulty prioritizing sometimes. If she’d gotten caught up in something, she could miss her interview altogether, and then, Keo would have to decline her admission to the program, and…well, Mabel had just better show up.

Luckily, Mabel burst through the door at twenty past, her hair askew and one shoulder of her sweater smoking slightly. She was followed by – Keo’s stomach dropped, and she slid her chair backwards across the floor. The young man who’d followed Mabel into the room was impeccably dressed, down to the tiny top hat that floated above his unruly brown hair, his eyes were inhumanly black and gold, and his feet didn’t touch the floor.

“Sorry we’re late!” Mabel announced brightly, flopping into one of the office chairs in front of Keo’s desk. “ _Somebody_  thought it would be a good idea to take a detour through a nest of swamp dragons.” She shot a dirty look at the man in the top hat, patting the smoking patch on her shoulder, and turned a wide and delighted grin in Keo’s direction. “Oh! I hope you don’t mind I brought my brother with.”

“Your…brother?” Keo managed, fumbling open her desk drawer and reaching for the rosary her mother had given her. Mabel’s grin grew, if it were possible, even wider.

“Yep! Don’t worry about him, he’s just being Mr. Overprotective because that cult we took down last week had a sister branch in Portland -”

“Mabel?” The young man (Mabel’s  _brother?!_ ) cut her tirade short, his eyes widening as he looked at Keo. “I think she sees me.”

“Whaaaaat?” Mabel bounced up and down in her seat. “That’s awesome! How’re you doing that?” she asked Keo, who could only shake her head and hold onto her rosary a little tighter. “Oh, come on, you gotta tell me!”

"I - I’ve always -” Keo stammered. She’d always seen things, yes, things her mother had told her never to tell anyone about, but never anything like  _this_. Suddenly, she understood just why her mother had always been so bothered by the things she saw.

“Aww.” Mabel slumped forward, throwing her head down on her arms on the front of Keo’s desk. The man she’d called her brother (that was a  _demon_ , there was no  _way_  he wasn’t, what was going  _on_  with the Pines family?!) looked disappointed too, but he drifted over, still without touching the ground, and threw an arm around Mabel’s shoulders.

“Hey, it’s okay, Mabel. It’s not like I’m not used to it -”

“But you shouldn’t have to be!” Mabel complained, raising her head up only long enough to shout before she let it flop back down.

“I’m – very sorry to interrupt, but – this is meant to be an entrance interview for Mabel, and she’s already twenty minutes late…?” Keo managed, through the wall of terror that seemed to clog her throat. Both Mabel and her brother looked up, and Mabel pouted up at her brother when he patted her shoulder.

“It’s all right. I could, uh, wait outside?” he offered, eyes flicking down to the rosary Keo still held clenched in one hand for an instant before he pointed at the door. Keo nodded, a little stiffly.

“Please. If you wouldn’t mind.”

 

vi.

"Hey, you’re back!” Lazy Susan said, as Stan walked in the door of the diner, followed by Mabel, staring at the ground. And if Mabel was here, then that meant Dipper must be, too. “You kids staying long this visit?”

Mabel settled into their usual booth and laid her head down on the table, face-first, her hair falling over her shoulders to hide her face from view. She mumbled something that Susan didn’t quite hear.

“Nah, they’re not visiting,” Stan said, and something was wrong if  _he_  sounded more cheerful than  _Mabel_ , even if it was forced. “The kids are gonna be staying with me. Just like that summer they first came down here, except forever.”

From under the curtain of her hair, Mabel let out a choked sob.

Susan and Stan exchanged a helpless look.

“Well, I’ll rustle you all up some pancakes,” Susan offered, at last, surprised when even this didn’t get a reaction out of Mabel. “And…welcome back, you two.”

She looked directly at the empty seat beside Mabel when she said it, and she could almost swear that she saw  _something_. It was just a flicker, there and gone again in an instant, but for some reason, she felt like smiling.

“Two stacks of pancakes, then,” she said, and retreated to the kitchen. Maybe she could add something special to them. Sprinkles? Fruit? Gravy? Just something nice.

Something to make them feel, even just a little bit, at home.


End file.
